Successes and Shadows

Have you ever thought about how major life events shape us, or even becomes our identity (in part or in whole)? Or how the attachments to past events (whether positive or negative) can hold us back from the larger potential of what we can be achieving in our lives in actuality?

Let us take for example: you have achieved something so great in your life that you find it impossible to do better than that. It could be because we have grown emotionally attached to our accomplishments, and cannot bear to outshine that event at a subconscious level. It could also be that it is so great to us personally, that anything benchmarked against that is lesser, lower, or even deemed as a failure. It could be a matter of fear of success (yes, there is such a thing at the subconscious level), or a matter of fear of failure. Our subconscious can be quite woozy in storing all kinds of garbage/gems…

Let us go back to the first example: we may intentionally choose areas that we do not shine at; or, we may intentionally hold ourselves back from shining, even though we know we can traverse the thresholds easily and effortlessly. It can be somewhat self-sabotage – purposely tripping ourselves out in new endeavours (which we have the real potential to excel in, in ways different from the previous “great accomplishment”) so that the prior “great accomplishment” is always and unequivocably the greatest. It is like a blanket we are so snuggly wrapped up in, but protection from that very blanket also blocked out all the stars.

See how fear of success plays out? How strange, yet how that makes so much sense too. Fear of failure is a little easier to comprehend. Let us go back to the same “great event” that now becomes the “great benchmark”, against which everything else dims and is deemed a failure. In this case, how it holds us back is that we are now afraid to try, or find that there is no point trying, and thus there is zero motivation to succeed. Or when we feel insecure about doing things correctly/incorrectly, we are not fully testing out possibilities of where we can do better. Or we may even miss out on valuable opportunities right in front of our face – we avoid them because we are fearful and insecure about how we will do.

We have accumulated so much experience and also so many stories in our lives. I am very thankful to have the tools to distill the essence and chuck out the drama that has already served its use. I hope sharing this distillation process can help you too. <3

Thank you marcianofab for the background image https://pixabay.com/images/id-4362282/